Karolyn Verville, right, and Tanya Miller finish treat a young opossum’s eye injury at Sunshine Wildlife Rehabilitation Haven, also her Riverside home on Aug. 9. Verville’s Sunshine Wildlife Rehabilitation Haven is unique because she’s licensed to rehab all kinds of wildlife and return them to the wild. She’s trying to get thecCity of Riverside where she lives, let her rent the empty conservation facility it owns.

Tanya Miller bottle feeds a kitten at Sunshine Wildlife Rehabilitation Haven on August 9. Karolyn Verville, whose Sunshine Wildlife Rehabilitation Haven is unique because she’s licensed to rehab all kinds of wildlife and return them to the wild. She’s trying to get the City of Riverside where she lives, let her rent the empty conservation facility it owns.

RIVERSIDE >> Karolyn Francoise Verville has nursed and returned to the wild an opossum pierced by an arrow, a pigeon with a broken leg, a sick raccoon, a gray fox hit by a car and an orphaned baby dove.

“I cannot stand to see them suffer,” she said.

Trouble is, Verville is running out of room at Sunshine Haven, the nonprofit wildlife rescue and rehabilitation center she runs at her 2-acre property in Riverside.

This past March through October, she will have taken in 700 critters, nearly double the number she’d nurtured in 2015. By October 2017, she expects 1,000 ailing, injured or motherless birds and mammals to have rotated through her cages.

Since Sunshine dawned in 2009 with Verville’s first critter, a baby kangaroo rat, the volume of animals has steadily increased. Police, animal control, state fish and wildlife officers and firefighters bring in 80 percent of them; the rest come from the public. She has broadened her scope beyond Riverside County, working with law enforcement agencies in Fontana, Colton, Rancho Cucamonga, Upland, Ontario, Pomona, La Verne and Claremont.

Now Verville, 45, wants support from officials who use her services: money, supplies and, best-case scenario, a building. She works up to 16 hours a day, but vows never to abandon her mission. A social-welfare program pays Verville’s one assistant.

‘IT ISN’T FAIR’

“It isn’t fair that this is all on my time and out of my pocket,” she said. “The city and county need to step up to the plate and care for their own wildlife.”

Every other agency that drops off a bird or animal also brings huge bags of food, syringes, other medical equipment “and all kinds of goodies,” Verville said.

Verville realizes wildlife rescue is a low priority among strained budgets and that grants for wildlife are non-existent.

“There are plenty of grants to help domestic animals when it involves low-cost vaccinations, spaying and neutering,” she said. “But there’s nothing for wildlife, which are considered urban pests, except for species in danger of extinction. At the end of the day, agencies can’t recoup their money for wildlife because there are no owners, no adoptions, no wallet to pay for vet bills.”

Mike Gardner, a Riverside City Councilman and board member of Animal Solutions Konnection, the nonprofit arm of the county’s Department of Animal Services, is one of Verville’s biggest allies after visiting Sunshine Haven.

“Animal Services doesn’t have the equipment to do what Karolyn does,” he said. “I don’t know if we’re going to see much money invested from the government side, at least for the short-term.”

HIGH COST OF CARE

Typically, Verville tends to 50 to 60 creatures at a time. It costs $1,000 a month just for food and first-aid supplies to run Sunshine. This works out to $80 per animal, Verville said. Almost 80 percent is financed by her businessman husband, Craig Johnson, 66, and the rest through donations. Johnson owns the Ontario-based Bausman & Co., makers of handcrafted furniture that’s sold nationwide.

“My husband would like it all (Sunshine Haven) out of this house,” Verville said.

Cages holding kittens under 2 pounds and counters and shelves and cabinets filled with clinical equipment have swallowed the laundry room, the nerve center.

Verville performs blood tests, fecal smears and necropsies, treats wounds, screens for parasites and diseases, de-worms critters, and identifies and keeps specimens in vials. She sends small song birds (except doves and pigeons) and raptors (except ravens and crows) to Hope Wildlife in Corona, which specializes in birds and squirrels. Verville lacks the big flight cages for raptors and takes on certain avians to spare Hope their long, expensive recoveries.

Sunshine has been licensed as a satellite of Hope Wildlife for the past seven years by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. “It was easier and I got all the same benefits,” Verville said.

Wildlife education mission

But with her new mission, Verville paid $40 applied a week ago to the state’s fish and wildlife department for her own wildife rehabilitator’s license, which should come in 60 days.

“It was quite a thick application requiring a binder, like applying to the CIA,” she said.

When she’s approved, her goal is to clone herself by teaching the next generation of wildlife rehabilitaters through classes at her other nonprofit, a private school called the Riverside Hebrew Academy. Verville, who is Jewish, formed this 501(c) in 2012 so that she could educate her young son.

Truth is, Verville’s husband wants their home back. He complains that cages have commandeered one of their garages, crowding out their gym equipment and forcing Verville’s car into the driveway, where the sun pummels it.

Corona veterinarian Barton Huber has epoxied and wired together the cracked shell of the dog-chewed turtle that now lives in Sunshine’s pond. He praises Verville’s knowledge, research, education and expertise.

“I don’t know of anyone doing as much for the furry wildlife,” he wrote in an email.

John Welsh, a spokesman for Riverside County Department of Animal Services, said the department partners with more than 100 rescue groups, all of them operating “on their own dime,” mostly through fundraising. Because of the tremendous expenses involved, he’s seen a lot of these organizations fail or the owners turn into hoarders.

“Wildlife is not an animal control issue,” he said. “It’s a state Department of Fish and Wildlife issue and they only have two wardens who work this region.”

Animal control officers evaluate injured wildlife on a case-by-case basis, Welsh said. If they’re suffering beyond help and the injuries are beyond healing, the animal will be euthanized. If there’s hope for recovery, the staff takes it to Sunshine Haven.

“Karolyn is fantastic, taking some amazing cases,” Welsh said.

Possible help for sunshine

Riverside Councilman Gardner said the city is talking about the possibility of creating a nature center at Riverside’s Fairmount Park, which could ease Verville’s caseload. Plus, he’s looking into leasing to Verville the city’s abandoned half of the old jointly owned city-county animal shelter at 5950 Wilderness Ave., Riverside. The city’s side is derelict and in bad shape; the county’s side contains archives.

Right now, simply leasing the city’s portion to Sunshine Haven is not an option, said Vincent Yzaguirre, deputy director of Riverside County’s Economic Development Agency’s real estate division. The 49,000-square-foot facility, financed through bonds in 1995, is considered a government surplus property. It’s valued at $2.5 million and must be offered first as a sale to public entity bidders. If no one bites, then the private sector can jump in.

Besides that, Yzaguirre said, the deteriorating building would need to be brought into compliance with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the Americans With Disabilities Act.

Why wildlife Calls to her

Verville, who holds a doctorate in the philosophy of education, admits she prefers animals to people. However, she has no qualms eating meat and doesn’t condemn fishing, hunting or trapping. When they’re done properly in the right territories, such as the forests of her native Canada, these practices are good tools to help maintain biodiversity, she said.

Verville grew up in a small French Canadian city near Quebec called Beauport, where she found her calling early. At 8, she started nursing injured animals.

“I picked up a woodchuck on the side of road that was still breathing,” Verville recalls. “I wrapped it in my coat and brought it home and fed it water. Twenty minutes later, it died. I learned it was OK to die, but it was not OK to die thirsty.”

After getting her doctorate, Verville returned to Quebec for a post-doctorate degree in bioethics and wildlife management. During that time, she taught humane fur-trapping practices and then worked with land surveyors before the cold drove her to Southern California. Verville moved to a condo in Long Beach and worked as a musician before settling in Riverside in 2004 with her boyfriend — Johnson. Two years later, they married and are parents of a 9-year-old-son, Clifford, and seven pets — three rescued dogs, some with disabilities, and four cats.

For a few months, Verville volunteered at the Riverside County animal shelter before turning from domestic creatures to wildlife.

“I expected to take 10 to 12 a year,” Verville said in her musical French accent. “But it turned into a full-time job.”

She’s also a credentialed animal-cruelty investigator and humane officer, empowered to bring cases to the district attorney.

“You don’t mess with me,” Verville said with a grin. “A dead animal doesn’t lie. I can tell what killed it.”

Sunshine’s critters

While giving a tour of Sunshine, Verville lovingly narrated her creatures’ stories, their fall and rise and eventual release. Never adopted, they’re set free in orange groves or behind Riverside Municipal Airport.

One of the cages housed an unfriendly red diamond-backed rattlesnake in a sealed container marked “Venomous” in yellow tape. Verville recently set it free.

“This dude is so old,” Verville said, indicating a sleeping opossum she’d had for a few weeks who’s too feeble and weak to rehabilitate and release. “He’s at the end of his life,” she said. “He will die here.”

In another cage on the mend is a beady-eyed mama opossum who lost three fingers to a rat trap a month ago. She’s healing nicely, so Verville will free her in a few weeks.

“That looks a lot better, sweetheart,” she cooed to another opossum she was treating with Puracyn Plus, a wound cleanser, for an eye infection from a dog bite. “I don’t expect him to be happy,” Verville said matter-of-factly as the marsupial hissed and bared his teeth. She expects to set him free in a few weeks.

“If I don’t do these things, the animals will die,” Verville said.

Her favorites and specialties are raccoons, “highly intelligent problem-solvers,” Verville said. “They’re sweet as babies, but as adults, their bunny kicks can shred you to pieces.”

She releases babies when they’re 4 months, old enough to care for themselves, so they don’t boomerang into animal control again.

Equally passionate about music and sports, Verville plays jazz tenor sax professionally in a quintet called the Saxuets and left defense for the Riverside Renegades, an ice hockey team. Another garage on their property is filled with her husband’s Nascars that he races.

But nothing has quite won her heart like her animals.

“There is a need for what I do,” Verville said. “No, there’s a moral imperative.”

Laurie Lucas started at The Press-Enterprise in 1981 in the human interest section called Sidelight. Since then she has written mostly features but also detoured into municipal meetings, covering Eastvale, Moreno Valley, Perris, Canyon Lake and Lake Elsinore. After a couple of years as a business reporter, she returned in 2014 to features. She now writes mostly profiles, arts and entertainment stories, dining profiles and a weekly Foodie Empire column. She would love to be a musician, singer dancer, artist, author or scratch cook. But because she’s not, she enjoys a vicarious thrill writing about other people’s talents.

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